Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.
IRVIN D. YALOMThe pain is there; when you close one door on it, it knocks to come in somewhere else.
More Irvin D. Yalom Quotes
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Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.
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I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.
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Living safely is dangerous.
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Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them.
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Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)
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It’s not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It’s like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.
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I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.
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If one is to learn to live with the dead, one must first learn to live with the living!
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Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.
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The spirit of a man is constructed out of his choices.
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Mature love is loving, not being loved.
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The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.
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As we reach the crest of life and look at the path before us, we apprehend that the path no longer ascends but slopes downward toward decline and diminishment. From that point on, concerns about death are never far from mind.
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Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.
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This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
IRVIN D. YALOM






